Between September and March, I was tasked with creating a flexible gripper to handle a variety of objects using Grabit’s core technology, Electroadhesion. After some 14 revisions of the gripper, this particular one ended up being sent to Chicago for the ProMat materials handling conference in March. A video of the gripper in action can be found here on Youtube.
I actually ended up making 4 similar units of the EachPick gripper. Two of the units were for mounting on the robot, and the other two units had a handle with a button for manual operation.
The fabrication techniques used for each of the units included aluminum machining, 3D printing, vinyl cutting, laser cutting, and vacuum forming. The robot-mounted versions of the EachPick gripper are controlled using a Pololu Maestro Servo Controller through TTL communication. The Denso RC8 controller handles the timing of the opening, closing, and operation of the LEDs and high voltage along with the motion of the robot arm. The handheld versions of the EachPick gripper are controlled with an Arduino Uno, stripped from the programming board.
Anselm Mak 